He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and exhaustively. He felt now a little emaciated mentally and somewhat absent-bodied--so he put it to himself. A numb languor, not unpleasant, held him passively supine, the while he gave himself over to speculative thought.
A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little vessel was in the middle of the North Sea ... _bound for Antwerp_!
"Oh-h," said Kirkwood vindictively, "_hell_!"
So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment ebbing from his thoughts left him rather interested than excited by the prospect. He found that he was neither pleased nor displeased. He presumed that it would be no more difficult to raise money on personal belongings in Antwerp than anywhere else; it has been observed that the first flower of civilization is the rum-blossom, the next, the conventionalized fleur-de-lis of the money-lender. There would be pawnshops, then, in Antwerp; and Kirkwood was confident that the sale or pledge of his signet-ring, scarf-pin, match-box and cigar-case, would provide him with money enough for a return to London, by third-class, at the worst. There ... well, all events were on the knees of the gods; he'd squirm out of his troubles, somehow. As for the other matter, the Calendar affair, he presumed he was well rid of it,--with a sigh of regret. It had been a most enticing mystery, you know; and the woman in the case was extraordinary, to say the least.
The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this time more violently: a sigh that was own brother to (or at any rate descended in a direct line from) the furnace sigh of the lover described by, the melancholy Jaques. And he sat up, bumped his head, groped round until his hand fell upon a doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the blowsy emptiness of the ship's cabin proper, whose gloomy confines were made visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp swinging violently in gimbals from a deck-beam.
Kirkwood's clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly out of shape, had been thrown carelessly on a transom near the door. He got up, collected them, and returning to his berth, dressed at leisure, thinking heavily, disgruntled--in a humor as evil as the after-taste of bad brandy in his mouth.